PLAYING WITH AN IDEA

  THE serious magazines, without having any convictions to speak of, are just sufficiently stern or bigoted to forbid irreverence. The frivolous magazines are even more stern and bigoted; for they forbid reverence. They actually veto the instinctive mention of mighty and holy things. Thus the sincere journalist is kept constantly in a state of roaring inaction; having been forced to make his theology dry he plunges with a far more boyish ardour into the pleasures of pure folly. But the swing of the pendulum is some times rather wild and dizzy. My meaning is this: that a good man ought to love nonsense; but he ought also to see nonsense — that is, to see that it is not sense. Our very pleasure in pure fancies should consist partly in the certainty that they are not facts. Nothing is more perilous and unmanly in modern thought than the way in which people will be led a dance by some dexterous and quite irresponsible suggestion, some theory in which even the theorist does not believe, some intellectual levity which is not honest enough even to be called a lunacy. They hear some flying notion — as that Cromwell wrote Milton, or that Christianity was stolen from the Aztecs; they receive it first laughingly, then fancifully, then speculatively, then seriously, then idolatrously, even to slaying; and yet all the time with nothing to go on but the fourth-hand version of a few entertaining coincidences. Exactly that sort of neat and fantastic solution which would make a glorious detective story is employed to make an utterly preposterous book of history or criticism.

  No, I do not think it is wrong to play with these nonsensical hypotheses; I have had great fun out of fitting them together. One of my friends maintains that Tacitus never lived and that his works are a forgery of the sixteenth century; another explains the whole life of St Paul in terms of an unabated hatred for Christianity. I am not against playing the fool with these fancies, but I am against letting them play the fool with me. To take one case at random, one could certainly make a huge theory, upheld by many coincidences, that men’s surnames have constantly suited them. It really is a remarkable thing to reflect how many frightfully fine men have had frightfully fine names. How could we have rounded off our sentences without such names as ‘Hannibal’ and ‘Napoleon’, or ‘Attila’ and ‘Charlemagne’? But there are more startling cases. There is one great artist whose art was ultimately sacred and seraphic, yet in its labour and technique peculiarly strenuous and military; if one looked at his work only one would think of a harsh angel, an angel in armour. How comes it that this man actually bore the name of the Archangel Michael — Michelangelo? How comes it that a contemporary and more gracious artist happened to be christened after a more gracious archangel — Raphael?

  Or take another case. If you or I had to invent out of our own heads a really shattering and shining name, a name fit for some flaming hero defying the stars, a name on horseback and high in the saddle — could we think of any so chivalrous or so challenging as Shakespeare? The very word is like Lancelot at his last tournament with a touch of the divine impotence of Don Quixote. In fact, I know only one surname that is really finer than Shakespeare, and that is Brakespear, the only English Pope. A pleasing lyric in prose might be built up about the two of them; the one Englishman who rose to the highest of all official places, and the other who rose to the highest of all unofficial. Much eloquence and irony (if I had time to write them) might be uttered about the contrast between the English Pope, so humble and silent in his splendid publicity, and the English poet, so hearty and swaggering in his obscurity and neglect. It is at least certain that there was only one Englishman on the highest platform of priests, and only one on the highest platform of poets; and it is certain that each of their names is the only exact rhyme to the other one.

  That is what you might call a coincidence; but the coincidence goes further. The actual meaning of the two names is appropriate to the two men in their two positions. If there was one thing more than another that the Renaissance did it was to shake the spear, to brandish the lance even more than to use it, to value the lance more for its flapping pennon than its point. If there was one thing, on the other hand, that a Pope in the twelfth century had to do, it was to break the spear — to bend the thick necks of the throned fighters who could not otherwise have conceived anything so fine as fighting. William Shakespeare is really very like the exultant monster in the Old Testament, who laughs at the shaking of the spear. But Nicholas Brakespear stood in the Dark Ages for a simpler and more searching reminder, of Him who snappeth the spear in twain and takes off the wheel of the chariot.

  The above is an impromptu instance of what I call playing with an idea; but the question is, what does one think of the idea? I will tell you what I think of it; I think it is complete bosh. I am almost certain that Raphael and Michelangelo are a coincidence. I am almost certain that Shakespeare and Brakespear are an accidental rhyme. I will carry the fancy as far as I choose; but if it tries to carry me as far as it chooses, I will remind it of several things. I will point out to it that in plain fact the names of literary men are often quite arrestingly unsuitable. Newman was by no means a worshipper of novelty; and one of the most energetic and intelligent atheists of my acquaintance is saddled with the surname of Priest.

  Or take a classic example. Can anyone read the cold and cutting work of Swift without feeling that his surname should have been Steele? Can anyone read the impetuous work of Steele without feeling that his surname should have been Swift? We should really feel much happier if we could talk of the brilliant blunders of Dick Swift and the cool, saturnine strength of Jonathan Steele. In other words, my speculation about surnames is just large enough to fill a magazine article, but is not large enough to fill even a moderate-sized brain. It is this power of recovery after extravagance that I urgently recommend. Indulge in all the most decadent or futile fantasies, as long as you can curb the indulgence, like that of alcohol. Ride on the nightmare, if you prefer such horse flesh; only do not let the nightmare ride on you. Find the mare’s nest which rocks on the tallest and darkest trees, and steal the addled eggs; but do not make your breakfast off them every morning for ever. Learn to be nonsensical and then to be sensible again; to create strange things and still to be independent of them. Learn to suggest a thing, to urge it, to prove it, and still to disbelieve it. For the very few things that are really worth believing are not worth proving.

  THE WALKING PARADOX

  THE English People have a peculiar appetite for paradox. I suppose such a statement will itself be called a paradox; for the phrase is commonly applied, for some reason or other, not to Englishmen generally, but to the one sad and solitary Englishman who bears alone, in this column, the doom or judgement upon his race. Both he and his race, however, remain reasonably cheerful under it; and, though it is rather a bore to be called paradoxical, it is rather a compliment to be recognized as national. Nevertheless, there are shades of variety, and the mad English man may wear his wild rose with a difference. The curious thing about the representative Englishman of the last few centuries is that he instinctively pursued the wildest paradox and then accepted it as a solid truism. He said he was hard-headed, and stood on his head to prove it.

  For instance, saying, ‘We may not understand political theories, but our constitution works well in practice’, is a piece of wild paradox and only loved as such, like a non sense rhyme of Lear or Lewis Carroll. It is exactly like saying, ‘We cannot add up figures correctly; we are quite Content if the result comes out right.’ It is like saying, ‘It is true that we got the wrong longitude and the wrong latitude; but what does that matter when it means that we find the place we are looking for?’ There is no answer to this beautiful nonsense, except to say that we do not get the right result or find the right place, except in the Great Gromboolian Plain or the Land Where the Jumblies Live. But it is a beautiful land to live in, and it is remarkably like England. Of course, anything in England that was really practical was achieved in spite of neglecting the theoretical, and not because of it. But anything in England that was poetical, as distinct from practical, really did owe something to this taste for paradox. In this sense the other name of England is Elfland. From this spirit comes all that quaintness in the names of places or in the very plan of towns which is so delightful a feature of England and which is now being steadily destroyed.

  Even in the nonsense rhymes to which I have referred, there is a constant unconscious groping after this native tradition. Not for nothing did even the nonsense rhymer bear a name out of ancient British legend and literature; so that the merry madman was a sort of parody of the melancholy madman. One might almost write another grim and grotesque scene of madness, of the meeting between the tragic Lear and the comic Lear. But both are full of that quality of quaintness; that quality that pre vents the tragic hero, even when he is most tragic, from being entirely heroic; or, at any rate, from being entirely classic. The height from which a man in King Lear looks dizzily down is not a mountain or a Tower of Babel, but only one of those chalk cliffs that are to us the white walls of home. And when the nonsense rhymer invents a nonsense place and calls it The Chankley Bore, we feel by the very sound of it that it might be in Sussex.

  Or, again, there is nothing but paradox in the whole legend of the Strong Silent Man, as in the legend of the Dong with the Luminous Nose. Indeed, I remember suggesting that historical students may some day explain the inexplicable lyric by calling it a contemporary satire on Oliver Cromwell, who was jeered at in his own time for having a red nose, and revered in our time, far less reason ably, for being a Strong Silent Man. As a matter of fact, he may have been strong, but he was the very reverse of silent. He talked a great deal; and that is one of the things that makes me think there was really something in him. But anyhow, it is nonsense to assume that a man must have something in him merely because you cannot get anything out of him. It is a pure paradox itself. The natural and sensible assumption would be that a man who has anything to say will want to say it. And, nine times out of ten, anybody who really has anything to say does want to say it. He would be rather an unpleasant fellow if he did not. Indeed, he would be not much more reputable than a miser. It is no more admirable to have valuable suggestions to make and not put them into circulation than it is to have valuable coin of the realm and keep it stuffed into a greasy old stocking.

  Of course it is quite true that various accidents or conditions may keep a worthy man silent when he really is in the right; such as his being shy, his being born deaf and dumb, his being gagged by burglars and left alone in the coal-cellar, his being entrusted with a secret, or his being afflicted with a stammer. But these are exceptions. There may be strong silent men, as there may be strong deaf men, or strong short-sighted men. But deafness does not strengthen anybody; nor does strength in itself obscure the eyesight. The truth is that the whole of this notion is, if not entirely nonsensical, at least entirely poetical. The fancy fascinates the English temper, because there is in it a purely romantic effect of transition and surprise. It is obvious that it makes a better story, and especially a better play, if the quiet man in the corner suddenly takes the centre of the stage and reveals the secret of the drama. It is not unnatural that the nation which produced the greatest of dramatists should have a taste for such effects of drama.

  What is curious about the English psychology is this; that it has this purely artistic appetite and then persuades itself that it is practical. The notion of the vainglorious person, with his heart on his sleeve, defeated by the strong man, who has something more valuable up his sleeve, is a story that had been the foundation of a hundred farces and fanciful comedies and romantic melodramas before it was made the basis of a scientific theory of races or a scheme of the British Constitution. The strong silent gentleman had been in all sorts of shoddy or shabby theatrical parts; he had been the good brother and the bad baronet and the stranger and the first walking gentleman, and even Charles’s Friend, before it was discovered by science that he was the Nordic man and the sane and practical Anglo-Saxon.

  In other words, we have as a nation got our ideas out of novels and plays and poetical romances, much more than out of economic textbooks or even commercial ledgers. That sort of fiction is naturally full of paradox; or, in other words, full of surprise. It is the whole point of a fairy-tale to say that the fool found a windfall of amazing good fortune. Therefore we said that a politician who did not think about politics would somehow or other muddle through. It is the whole point of a melodrama that the man whose lips have been sealed until the last moment comes forward and declares the innocence of the heroine or the hiding-place of the will. Therefore we said that any politician who was incompetent to speak must always be competent to act.

  All this belongs to a world of wild and yet subtle in version with which I can sympathize; which, in its proper place, I am even prepared to defend. But practical politics is not its proper place; and our politics have not been more practical for following only this flying gleam of paradox. In this matter we really do need a little more of the iron common sense of the Latins, who know that schemes and systems are made with logic, just as machines and engines are made with mathematics. Just as they know that two and two make four, so they know that thinking is really necessary to acting. There is really some thing to be said for platitudes and plain intellectual processes; and the French peasant has remained very invincible in his own kitchen garden by dint of knowing how many beans make five. But it takes all sorts to make a world; and France has not produced Shakespeare or a nonsense rhyme.

  THE COLOUR OF SPAIN

  IT is to be hoped that people will realize that Spain is not so black as it was painted by those who only painted the black hoods of the Inquisitors or the Tennysonian dualism of Don and Devil. Spain in one sense is quite as black as it is painted, for the painters were particularly fond of painting in black. But being in black is by no means the same as being in mourning. We might almost say that the Spaniards are fond of bright colours and that black is the brightest of all their colours. They are very fond of it in art and decoration but the effect is not necessarily what the English used to call gloomy but rather what the French have called chic. It throws up all the other colours, especially the typically Spanish colours of gold and orange and copper and dark red. There are aspects in which all Spain seems to be striped with red and gold like the legendary shield of Aragon. But nothing could make that glowing shield glow more vividly than to be worn by a knight in black armour or carried by a page in black velvet.

  The well-known picture of the Spanish lady wearing a black mantilla and a red rose would be sufficient to make us recognize the tradition. The mantilla alone shows that black is a gay colour and almost the colour of frivolity. For the Spanish ladies who keep the old custom in this respect look far more like what the old ballads call ‘ladies gay’, the dames of a joyous Court, or the dancing girls of a jovial festival, than do the more modernized ladies who have obediently hidden their heads in the helmets of the last Parisian fashion. The colour of the Spanish scarf or veil is dark, but it is not dismal; it is bright because it is brisk; it can shift and change with posture and gesture and mood; it is alive like a black snake or a black bird or a black butterfly. The accident that some of Velasquez’s great portraits have a sombre dignity that is almost Satanic, and that Goya made black-and-white studies that are like the sketch-book of a goblin, should not lead us to exaggerate the sombre side of this use of black. The Spaniards do indeed use it where nobody else I know of has ever used it. I have actually seen black patches in a coloured church window. This is contrary to the very conception of windows, but it is quite consistent with the Spanish conception of colours.

  The same impression, and perhaps the same illusion, is doubtless produced by the Spanish churches which are kept unusually and to us unnaturally dark. It would seem as if the architect, like the artist, wished to produce great blocks of black and did it with great blocks of shadow. The altars and the altar-screens are prodigiously high and heavy like the portals of the palaces of giants. They seem to make the darkness darker, throwing a shadow even upon shade. Yet even here we find the triumph of contrast which is really the triumph of colour. The stained-glass windows are turned to swords of flame of an indescribable incandescence. The church is dark with the very density of its colour. The Spanish gold may be partly buried in the gloom, just as the Spanish gold of romance was so often buried in the green sea. But in the reality, as in the romance, we always think of the treasure as tremendously costly and complex and covering vast areas. Indeed, there is sometimes a sensation in these twilight churches of walking as if in the depths of the sea; as if the hundreds of little candles were a phosphorescence or the great canopies and banners the shapes of flat and floating fishes of gigantic size.

  The contrast struck me very sharply when I had crossed the Pyrenees, and found again the French Spirit in the church and castle of Carcassonne, in an open lantern of lofty windows luminous as the soul of St Louis. But though the French spirit has more clarity it has not more colour; it has not really more gaiety. There are all sorts of gaiety even in the Spanish churches, when once we understand them; there is any amount of it in the Spanish Streets and houses. There is all that spirit that is so puzzling to many people in the religious processions associated with Seville. I say associated with Seville because, as a matter of fact, the association is much too arbitrary and limited. Most people imagine that the fantastic dance of dwarfs and giants is something that can be seen only at Seville, as the Eiffel Tower can be seen only in Paris. I, for one, did not even go to Seville but I saw, and heard any amount about, such dances and processions in any number of other towns and villages. These ancient games and gaieties have been preserved in the past all over the Spanish peninsula; yet I fear that there are very few tourists who trouble much about them in their less famous habitations. They are few indeed compared with the number of tourists who deliberately rush to see bull-fights in order to boast that they cannot bear the sight.